there is kind of this magic process by which, like, your words eventually do become real.

And, like, it's why I think so many people are trying to push these limits of free speech,

because, you know, like, if you can imagine it, it can happen.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host,

Power Smarks, and this week my guest is Julia Black. Julia is a features reporter at the Information's Weekend team, and she's been on the show in the past to talk about pronatalism, and of course, she's also on our new series, Data Vampires.

Julia does a lot of really fascinating reporting on the increasingly concerning ideologies

and worldviews of people in Silicon Valley

and how they are becoming much more prominent. And what of the important figures for the

dissemination of these types of ideas is Curtis Jarvin. Now, he hasn't come out of nowhere. He's been

around and there have been people in the tech industry who have been interested in his ideas and

who have been espousing them for, you know, quite some time now. And by that, I mean not years,

but decades. But it seems like in the past few years, and in particular, in this electoral cycle,

in the United States, these ideas that Yarvan has been writing about for many years now are really coming to the fore and really do seem to be reaching this level of dominance in at least a certain section of the tech billionaires that we often talk about.

And those ideas, of course, are things like an opposition to democracy, eliminating the deep state, you know, something that we hear

these right-winger talking about quite a lot. But also things like getting rid of the free press

and replacing it with a state media. Also, you know, the state can supposedly move at the speed of a

startup and do what these tech people want it to do. But I wanted to talk to Julia because Curtis

Yarven is a really weird figure. And I wanted to talk to Julia because Curtis Yarven is a really weird figure,

and I wanted to explore that with her to try to understand how this guy who used to just write a

weird blog has now become one of these like intellectuals of the tech right to such a degree that

as they have risen, his ideas have risen with them

and are now shaping aspects of right-wing politics more generally, especially as you see

...